June 2013

Mobile payments are nothing new - it seems everyone is trying to get into the game from PayPal to credit card companies and of course Google. Can any company be far behind the move from messy, dirty physical money to electronic currency?

It seems inevitable that the move will happen - the questions worth asking are, how long with the transition take and exactly how do we hide electronic money under our mattresses after the next financial crisis? I leave the latter question to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to figure out but it seems Clinkle wants to be the company that helps bring mobile payments really mainstream.

He was followed by the first demo which was Requestec who showed a banking demo and a call which allowed a Flash user to communicate with a WebRTC user. They believe they are the first to allow Flash to WebRTC interop.

WebRTC Expo kicks off this week and it's been a busy day here in Atlanta, Georgia where I have had back-to-back video interviews with companies in tech and telecom. A few of my meetings with companies involved in WebRTC were perhaps the most interesting as I see a trend devloping.

Soufiane Houri of Weemo told me about the company's cloud-based API service which allows any developer to embed video collaboration. The goal here is to enable this collaboration to take place without the need to make a user leave one application and go to another.

Facebook famously announced similar integration with Skype a few years back with the idea being allowing users to stay in the platform and collaborate with their friends.

I was recently interviewed by Content Marketing Examiner on the topic of content marketing and in this interview you get to hear the experience I have gained watching thousands of companies market successfully and unsuccessfully. You may think in order for a company to market in the most effective manner they need to spend the most money or have the most creative agency. The reality is many companies have these things but fail with the basics and as a result all that extra spending does not result in successful market penetration.

One of the nuggets you will learn on the podcast is How is Successful Marketing like a Successful 401K?

One of the most interesting aspects of my career is watching the thousands of companies I have met over the years make it or not make it. For every success like Netflix, eBay, TellMe and Digium there are countless other failures – companies who seem to have a solid technology angle but somehow fail to communicate their message effectively.

I was reminded of this fact when I saw The Carousel from Mad Men. The video above reminds us how technology is not really exciting – neither are new products. What is exciting is how new ideas and solutions are weaved into a story which potential customers will embrace and be passionate about.

This is even more true decades after the above-scene took place because we now have social media which can instantly propel or destroy brands based upon how consumers feel about them.

It’s been a busy week regarding NFV and the software telco (R)evolution. First off Dialogic had some solid thoughts on six of the network elements ripe for NFV – they are routers, SBCs, media servers, softswitches, signaling nodes and DPI/WAN acceleration solutions – it is worth pointing out that on this last area the company’s Jim Machi says they are a “maybe”. You can read his thoughts for the details.

Cisco had some news in the space as well. The company’s Kelly Ahuja SVP, GM, Mobility Business Group spent about an hour discussing the impact of NFV on the company’s business.

Mergers are nothing new but about a decade ago in the telecom market they reached a fever pitch when SBC purchased AT&T and rebranded itself with the name of the acquired company. At the time it became common in the industry to believe consolidation among carriers meant consolidation needed to take place at the equipment supplier level.

The idea is if you have fewer customers, you have less pricing power which means lower overhead with means merging suppliers can eliminate redundant costs such as accounting, marketing, HR and other “synergistic” areas of the business.

Large carriers have also been known for choosing large suppliers for their hardware needs as they felt these larger companies were more likely to be around to support them in the future as they roll out their solutions.

The Yealink SIP T-38G Gigabit color LCD PoE IP phone is another impressive IP phone following in the steps of the Yealink T-28P that Tom Keating reviewed in 2010. Tom liked the 4-way arrow navigation keypad, which continues on the T-38G, making navigating on the color screen a breeze. The T-38P also features a very similar web admin page as the T-28P and like Tom I had no trouble adding the SIP credentials, configuring the NTP server, adding speed dials, and other various configuration options.

While referencing Tom's T-28P review for comparison to the T-38G, Tom has this noteworthy comment:

The web interface displays a message when the phone is registered so you know immediately if you put the SIP credentials in correctly. I have to say, I really loved how every change I made DOES NOT require a reboot.

For a federal government riddled with scandals this news may not seem so important but it is indicative of the logic of government. The numerous documents which have been leaked all over the Internet regarding PRISM and countless other government spying programs are off-limits to Senate staffers. They have been asked by the Senate Security Office not to download documents which are potentially classified - even though everyone on the planet likely has.

The move from proprietary hardware to software running on commercial off-the-shelf servers at the world’s telcos is one of the biggest transformations we will see this decade. Over time we can expect to see a number of network functions which used to be supplied by hardware vendors through proprietary boxes turn into software running on servers with Intel or ARM chips perhaps supplied by HP or Dell running VMware or some other flavor of virtualization. The concept is called Network Functions Virtualization or NFV. I wrote about the concept a while back in a post Metaswitch Asks: Are You Ready to be a Software Telco? and more recently in NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability.

34% of Internet radio users surveyed would switch to Apple’s iRadio and some believe this is a major problem for Pandora. I remember when Google was going public, similar research showed users would also switch to a better search engine given the opportunity. The challenge is many people are set in their ways and inertia keeps them from switching.

What Apple needs to do is make the radio integration so solid that you have no choice but to try it and perhaps like it better than the service you currently use.

There are a plethora of apps to communicate but precious few bubble up to the top. Quite often a company comes up with an idea for a service which improves on another form of communications. Tweetdeck and Hootsuite come to mind as examples.

Another new option is Moped 2.0 which goes live as you read this entry and allows users to more easily communicate with their social circles while adding in the capability of sharing media.

From an evolutionary standpoint regardless of whether we talk about nature or business, adaptation is a key to success in changing environments. During the industrial revolution in London a species of moth with a white color blended in with the bark of the local trees until soot from the nearby factories turned the trees black. Some darker moths were now camouflaged in the dark trees and eventually the species adapted and became black. When air quality improved, the moths over successive generations changed color again.

As scary as it sounds – that iOS device which you thought was safe from hackers because Apple controls the App Store could get infected through a malicious charger. This is a major concern for IT departments who didn’t previously worry about Apple devices which were not jailbroken. It is now impossible to know which Apple devices have been infected meaning all of them are suspect.

An article on TMCnet by Steve Anderson explains that a group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered the exploit which can be duplicated via a device called a Mactans charger.

If you haven’t checked out the TMCnet feature by Josh Alexander about companies Yahoo! should purchase, please do… I’ll wait. Ok – now that you’re back – isn’t this guy funny? It isn’t too often I read an article about tech where I learn things and also laugh out loud.

Apologies for being out of touch for a while – I have been keeping up on my social sites such as Twitter so I hope you have been following me there. I've been traveling a great deal and have interviewed many of the leading companies at Interop and CTIA recently and wanted to share many of them with you.

So far, Most of the Interop Las Vegas 2013 videos have posted and the CTIA 2013 videos have begun to post and will hopefully be completed tomorrow. By clicking the above links you will be able to scroll through whichever videos you choose.